perennial » preannual

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “If at all possible preannual rye grass is better. Not annual rye grass. 100% preannual.” (link)
  • “According to Jim Mason this variety is an preannual whereas the common sunflower is an annual.” (link)
  • “I forget if they are annual or preannual…whatever) and I faithfully watered them everyday …” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Mark Mandel (American Dialect Society mailing list, 10 September 2007)

Mark Mandel: I first saw “preannuals” for “perennials” on a flyer, handwritten and photocopied, that I picked up at our local Farmers’ Market last fall: “This being our last Market Saturday for the season, a tinge of sadness but also of hope prevails as we reorganize, till the soil, plant seeds, cover preannuals to overwinter, and in the wintertime start plants in our greenhouse.”

Reshaping the somewhat opaque -ennial part of perennial makes a clear contrast to annual, as in the cites above. Reshaping the per- part to pre- supplies a more easily recognizable prefix, though the semantics isn’t clear to me.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2007/09/17 |

Geiger » giga

Chiefly in:   giga counter

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I remember doing an experiment in our physics lesson one that involved testing the radioactivity of different radioactive isotopes with a giga counter. Well after we finished a few of use stayed behind (nerdy I know) and played with the giga counter a bit. We tried different things and didn’t get much of a reponse. Then we put a mobile phone next to it, that was on standby and it affected the giga counter readings quite a lot. After that we got someone to call the phone and the giga counter went crazy. (Message board post, Apr 9, 2006)
  • “What’s that noise?” asked Sam. Leia spun round. “That’s my giga-counter!” cried Leia. She ran into the cabin of the boat, and came out with an old giga-counter, a device used for detecting radioactivity, she pointed it towards the sphere and it started ticking faster. (Star Wars fan fiction)
  • Below is my reply to our friend in Daewoo who suggested i use a Giga-counter to check if my balls were effected by the Microwave Underpants. (Blog post, August 17, 2005)
  • The fact that the danger that keeps people out cannot be seen but heard through clicks on a giga-counter makes it all the more mysterious. (Windows Vista forum, March 26, 2007)
  • I would visit Area 51 if I was you, there’s always the chance you would see something or find something interesting. Get/Take a giga counter too, and see where the most radiation is. (Message board post, Oct 23, 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

Terms that contain proper names are often an open invitation for eggcornification. If you’ve never heard of Hans Geiger (1882-1945)[1], you may easily be led to think that the name of the instrument for measuring radioactivity comes from the very large numbers you tend to end up with when using it.

As an aside, in German, the stressed (first) syllable of Geiger’s name is pronounced with the diphthong [aɪ] (the sound in _bite_ or _lie_).

[1] I have an unfair advantage here as I went to the same secondary school as he did and, before each physics lesson, waited right in front of a display illustrating his achievements.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2007/09/16 |

told » tolled

Chiefly in:   all tolled , untolled

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • All tolled, the Republican administrations from Lincoln to Garfield gave their railroad buddies 155,504,994 acres (more area than Texas), until Democrat Grover Cleveland declared still-unclaimed portions open to settlement in 1887. (Bits of News, Sep 3, 2007)
  • No, not Scheme! Please, anything but Scheme! Oh, the memories, the horror, the untolled misery and death it left in its wake! (Slacker Central forum, April 3, 2002)
  • “Even if we get a killing frost, it wouldn’t change yields too much on our main grain crops,” he said Thursday afternoon. “All tolled, it won’t have much of an economic impact, not that it won’t cut down yield on the late planted crops, but there weren’t very many acres of that this year.” (Guardian Unlimited, Reader film review, Oct 22, 2003)
  • And also worth seeing for Johnny Depp’s comical antics. Good, silly fun. And, all tolled, much better than time spent in a Soviet-era holding cell. (Guardian Unlimited, Reader comment, Nov 22, 2006)
  • If you don’t believe the West’s possession of nukes didn’t save untolled lives during the Soviet era, you are ignoring reality, which is no unique event herein. ()

Analyzed or reported by:

It is hard to credit anyone for this eggcorn. The _all tolled_ version has been suggested twice on this very site, by Bill Bevis and Ken Lakritz, and is, as noted above, also in Brians. Jan Freeman used it as an example in her Eggcorn-themed column _Wanton Eggcorns_ in the Boston Globe on April 8, 2007.

Quite a number of people are convinced the _tolled_ version is the correct one and defend it, because it makes more sense to them:

* _It’s “all tolled” as in tallied, not “all told”
/english nazi_ (link)
* _untold instead of untolled when referring to numbers. “untold numbers of civilians were killed.” i hate that._ (link)

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2007/09/16 |

migraine » mindgrain

Variant(s):  mind grain

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • So Folks this has not been a very good week and I now have a headache that I hope it does not turn into a mindgrain. (Blog entry, April 20, 2007)
  • I WAS PUT ON DEPAKOTE AND IT HELP ME GREATLY CAUSE IT NOT ONLY HELPED MY BI-POLAR BUT IT HELPED MY SEIZURES AND MINDGRAIN HEADACHES. (IndianaGasPrices.com forum, June 30, 2004)
  • I think I do have a mind grain so I guess i’ll have to go out and get some medicine for that because this is just unbearable. (Blog entry, Sep 06, 2007)

Analyzed or reported by:

_Mindgrain_ is a classic eggcorn, very much in the spirit of _eggcorn_ itself.

In the words of “maron101″, writing on his Mulitply page:

> Funny thing, I thought it was “mindgrain” because there feels like grain is growing out of my mind. Ok, so maybe it’s not that funny, but still anyone who ever felt shooting pain in their heads might relate.

Indeed.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2007/09/15 |

might » my

Chiefly in:   my as well

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “If i can’t get this lever to work I my as well trash my whole mod. and crawl inside of a bottle.” (link)
  • “you my as well set yourself up with a cathador then have to run to port-o-johns every 10 minutes…” (link)
  • “I figure if I haven’t broken that habit now at the age of 22, I my as well come to peace with it and push ahead!” (link)

This one belongs with mine as and minus as reinterpretations of the first part of the idiom might as well. They probably all originated in mishearings and depend on some listeners’ unsureness about the identity of the first part of the idiom. They aren’t great examples of eggcorns, because they don’t (as Ben Zimmer observed to me about the nasal versions) make “sense” like the classic eggcorns do.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2007/09/15 |